Vinyl reissue: The Syndicate of Rhyme. With or without Wu-Tang Clan, The Genius, aptly named, cuts down the competition with a hip-hop of insolent richness. In this family, being good is no longer enough. After the successive solo assaults of his Wu-Tang Clan partners, The Genius had no choice but excellence. Considered by his peers to be the Master of Rhyme, The Genius, also known as The GZA, is a bit of the Clan’s godfather along with his cousin, producer Prince Rakeem, aka The RZA, whom he taught how to rhyme. You don’t become one of the Clan’s masterminds by chance: they had already gone through a tough apprenticeship in the music industry as early as 1991, with an album on Tommy Boy for Rakeem and one on the Cold Chillin' label for The Genius. It was by drawing the lesson from these bitter experiences — combined with the unsuccessful attempts to sign the entire Clan — that they quietly devised a unified strategy for invading the market. The imagery and philosophy (“One for all, all for one”) of the Clan were already well known, largely inspired by the kung-fu films that brightened their miserable adolescence on Staten Island. But none had yet insisted as much as The Genius on the metaphorical rhetoric of martial arts, deployed two years earlier on their joint album 36 chambers. Liquid swords — symbol of a tongue as sharp as a sword and of a style so sharp it cuts down the competition without appeal — is the central theme of the lyrics on this album of astonishing density. As much action, blood and corpses as in John Woo films, but with the morality, rigor and clan solidarity of samurai legends. A Clan album would not be complete without a few interventions from the brothers: thus, Method Man comes to cross swords on Shadowboxin' and Raekwon on Investigative reports, with Killah Priest backing up his accomplice on four other tracks. If each member of this brotherhood presents a different facet of the same entity, the architect The RZA manages the feat of staying the course while driving in zigzags. In one year, this workaholic at the controls produced four solo albums (Method Man, Ol'Dirty Bastard, Raekwon The Chef and The Genius) as well as dozens of tracks on various projects. Still as tense, but less haunted than usual, his sonic fabric is once again a maelstrom of discoveries to make all aspiring trip-hoppers drool. The Damocles sword hanging over his head — the inevitable weariness of the public and the media — is far from falling. - Les Inrocks